Susan Crawford is an eminent telcoms scholar, former government official (who resigned because of corruption in telcoms policy) and the author, recently, of an important book on telcoms corruption and net neutrality called Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. — Read the rest

Team Telecom is a group of lawyers from the FBI, DoJ, DHS, and DoD who were empowered to enter any US network operations center of companies like Global Crossing on 30 minutes' notice, allowing them to secretly audit and intervene in the maintenance of the Internet's biggest backbones. — Read the rest

Josh Stearns writes,

Denver is about to become the epicenter of awesome, when the National Conference for Media Reform comes to town bringing 2,500 coders, journalists, media makers, artists and comedians together to hack the future of tech, media and democracy.

Susan Crawford in Bloomberg on why the FCC should find BART in the wrong: "As far as anyone knows, no government agency in the U.S. had cut off general-purpose communications before BART took this step. The question before the FCC is whether BART's action violated the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which prohibits discontinuing or impairing service without due process." — Read the rest

After Sarkozy's "EG8" conference last week — an event that brought together government leaders and Internet execs to legitimize an effort to censor and surveil the net — a group of civil society people and activists threw an impromptu press-conference to explain what Sarko and company missed by treating the net as simply an engine for big business. — Read the rest

Kevin sez, "The Students for Free Culture Conference 2011 is a gathering of student activists, intellectuals, artists, hackers, and generally interested people to discuss the latest issues in the free cultural world, with a focus on student involvement and participation.

The conference will take place in New York City from February 19-20. — Read the rest

Nicholas sez,

The Open Video Conference in New York City is a two-day powwow for open web geeks, independent filmmakers, and everyone else.

This year's OVC takes place October 1-2 2010. With 60+ sessions on open source, HTML5, and participatory culture, the conference is bigger and better than before.

David sez, "Mitch Kapor's [ed: Founder of Lotus, co-founder of EFF] become the chair of One Web Day, plus the organization got a major grant from the Ford Foundation. The group, which sponsors an annual 'Earth Day' for the Web every September 22, was founded by Susan Crawford, who now advises the Obama White House on tech policy." — Read the rest

Earlier on Boing Boing, Cory blogged that President-elect Barack Obama has appointed Net Neutrality advocates and "virtual worlds nuts" Kevin Werbach and Susan Crawford to co-chair his FCC transition team. Okay, so we might know the guy as Kevin Werbach out here in meatspace, but to his Terror Nova Guild buddies, he's better known as Supernovan Jenkins (the first name presumably a reference to Werbach's Supernova tech conference series), and he's a Level 70 Tauren Shaman. — Read the rest

Wagner James Au sez, "Not only are [Obama's FCC Transition Team leaders] Kevin Werbach and Susan Crawford great Net Neutrality advocates, they're also into online games/virtual worlds– Werbach belongs to not one but *two* WoW guilds, and Crawford calls herself a "big fan" of Second Life. — Read the rest

Obama's FCC transition team is to be headed up by two of the smartest, hardest-fighting Net Neutrality advocates I know: Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach. This bodes very very well indeed for American telcoms policy!

Ms. Crawford is a former partner of a Washington law firm that specializes in communications law and recently left the board of directors of ICANN, a group that oversees Internet domain-name registration.

The US Treasury Department confiscated the domain names of a British/Spanish travel agent who specializes in Hemingway tours of Cuba. Treasury claims that since Americans might have made reservations through the sites, that they were entitled to march into the domain registrar and take away a foreigner's business. — Read the rest

This Saturday is the second annual "One Web Day." Susan Crawford writes,

The idea behind OneWebDay (happening for the second time this year) is to encourage people to think of themselves as responsible for the internet, and to take good and visible actions on Sept.

David sez, "Susan Crawford urges the US to stop pussyfooting around and do what needs to be done: Restructure the Internet carriers so they allow competition, and separate the carriers of bits from the suppliers of content and services. This is how you get Net Neutrality that works." — Read the rest

Public Knowledge, EFF and others are suing the FCC, arguing that it doesn't have the authority to impose the Broadcast Flag rule. The Broadcast Flag says that anyone who makes a device to receive digital television signals has to get all its recording and output technologies approved by the FCC, and the FCC will withhold approval from all technologies save those that encrypt the shows and keep you from doing what you want with them. — Read the rest